The shock when you meet Étienne Daho for the first time is his voice.
It hardly matters what he tells us, as the tender breath of his voice envelops and evokes.
It is that of the first sunny hits, whose bewildering list has made him the patron of pop;
that of the darker melodies of maturity;
the one that has embraced and set concert halls ablaze for forty years.
She is sweetness reconciled with irony, this unique way of being both nice and sexy.
It would be wrong, however, to be lulled by the form without listening to the substance.
Because the singer has the rare gift of speaking little to say a lot.
Each word goes straight to the point, the same goes for silences.
He himself seems surprised, at the end of the interview, he laughs: "I left to discuss sailor,
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The marinière was however the starting point.
The one, precisely, that Étienne Daho has just designed for the Saint James brand, within a capsule collection which also includes a peacoat, a sweater, pants, a hat, a jacket and two scarves, all available from September 22 in store.
The artist, a figure of casual elegance, was offered this collaboration a year and a half ago, when he donated thirty-four of his clothes to the Paris Fashion Museum.
Among this bequest was a 1984 Saint James sailor top that has become iconic.
“I wear it on the cover of the album
La Notte
,
la Notte
, he apologizes almost smiling.
And, well, the photography is done by the great artists Pierre and Gilles, who always make you more beautiful than you are.
They put their Bibic parrot on my shoulder, sprinkled me with water… The image remained.”
The house of Saint James gave carte blanche to the singer, a relevant idea in more ways than one: he is "in love with Brittany", grew up in Rennes, spends part of his free time in Saint-Malo.
And he is one of the first singers to have taken the sailor's wardrobe out of the trawler context, to have mixed it with rock leather jackets.
“A sailor sweater, for example, he analyzes very seriously, we always want to buy one, because it evokes this feeling of warmth, of comfort.
And then, finally, when new, we find that it's too tight around the neck, that it's too long, that it stings... Result, we put back the old one that we've had for twenty years in our wardrobe.
This is what I tried to create: already familiar, soft models that we wear all the time because they fit us perfectly.
On video, Étienne Daho,
His silence speaks volumes
, the official clip
From his sumptuous suits designed by Hedi Slimane, who has become a friend, to his studded Perfecto jackets, Étienne Daho likes to take care of his clothes.
“On stage, it’s part of the transformation.
When you enter the garment, you enter the skin of the one who is going to show himself.
It's not my nature, I'm not an exhibitionist at all.
I need a mental process, a preparation from the morning to manage this mixture of excitement and fear.
Because we know, we feel people's excitement too.
Maybe they bought the ticket a long time ago, they are coming with someone important to them.
Opposite, we want to be the best possible.
We cling to this emotion.
When, in 1986, during the Pop Satori tour, a fan stole his stage costume in Bordeaux, he experienced the demonstration in reverse.
“I had to play with stuff bought at full speed, it was not going at all.”
The bad trick happened several times.
"It happens, yes, there are fetishists," he laughs, as if he didn't believe it himself.
So, after, I planned to have doubles.
It was the era of "Dahomania", a name invented by the media to sum up the screaming fans, the packed house concerts chained in France and abroad, the records sold by the hundreds of thousands, the hits to die for (
The Big Sleep
,
Duel in the sun
,
Shoulder Tattoo
,
Blue like you
,
…).
Hell and Eden
In 1991, the album
Paris Ailleurs
, carried by five overpowering singles (
Disaster attractions
,
Saudade
,
Comme un igloo
,
Les Voyages immobles
,
Un homme à la mer
), took him on tour in fourteen countries.
At the end, the singer collapses.
“If I had continued at this rate, I would have died, he says today.
Too much work, too many parties, too much of everything.
And then those moments of total hysteria, where people were sleeping across my doormat, it was not possible.
I'm not cut out for that.
Even though I loved the joyful side, the incredible gift that it works so much.
So many projects, requests, we live in a thing where we are perched most of the time.
It's an addiction.
So we continue.
Until the moment when I found myself on the edge of the precipice without realizing it.
One night at a concert in Los Angeles, Daho steps over the balcony of his room at the Chateau Marmont hotel.
What kept him from letting go of the railing?
“A flash of terror.
I realized there was a momentum pushing me to get it over with, a sort of raptus, but it wasn't me at all.
Like when you see the madman in yourself, when you imagine yourself doing something absurd or violent.
I took two, three years to recover from this period.
I went to London, I made the
Eden
album , it was really a cure.
Going to see a shrink was also necessary.
“I couldn't have done without.
Especially since once you have solved a certain number of problems, dad, mom, etc., it allows you to better understand others.
This “healthy crash” of the 1990s is also linked, he says, to the death of his father.
Like a paradox, losing a father who abandoned him, whom he barely knew, puts him on the ground.
“It meant it was definitely a failed relationship.
It couldn't be taken back."
Étienne Daho was born in Oran, in January 1956. The port city, then spared by the Algerian war, lived its last years of carelessness.
His mother, Lucie, is of Spanish origin, from a family of hardworking and rigorous small traders.
His father, Étienne, is Kabyle.
He wanted to give his first name to his son, "out of pride in having a boy" after the birth of two daughters.
Couldn't be more dissimilar than my parents
Etienne Daho
A reveler, fickle, he spends his time partying, squandering a small family fortune he inherited.
“We couldn't be more dissimilar than my parents.
They were young, they fell in love, then they did what they could.
I think it was complicated and sad for both of them.”
From Algeria, which he will not leave until 1964, two years after the Evian agreements, the singer has kept two images, at the antipodes.
On one side is Cap Falcon, a seaside resort about twenty kilometers from Oran, where her grandmother and her aunts run a small grocery store-café near the beach.
In the room sits a jukebox, which fascinates him.
“It's my first love story, this jukebox.
The beginnings of rock, the yé-yé… And immediately, the relationship to the disc object.
From 2 years old,
I knew exactly which one I wanted to wear.
They called me 'Only You' because I jabbered the Platters' song."
The child spends most of his time there.
His mother works, his father disappears definitively when he is 4 years old.
On the opposite side of this Eden are the images of Oran when the war arrives there.
The sound of sirens, which Daho included in his album
Blitz
, that of bullets and explosions.
The feeling of danger, even stronger when he is sent to boarding school.
tears and armor
His mother, his sisters and him are among the last French people to leave Algeria: travel is prohibited without the authorization of the husband, who left without leaving an address.
Little Étienne was 8 years old when he took the plane with his aunt Francine, heading for Reims, then Rennes.
His mother joins him there.
They move into a housing project, she finds a job as a secretary for a chemical factory.
The landing is rough, Étienne Daho finds the city gray and cold.
No way to complain though.
Silence and modesty are his mother's watchwords.
“He's a very collected person, he smiles.
She doesn't show her feelings at all.
I remember being yelled at, at the start of my career, because I had said things that bothered her.
He himself hates lamentations.
"Yes,
Hard Skin
.
“You can't escape your early years.
Whatever the distance we put, the way we have to no longer suffer from it.
But we are changing things.
We become someone by building ourselves with everything that we missed.
I feel stronger than most people I know."
You can't escape your early years.
Whatever the distance we put, the way we have to no longer suffer from it
Etienne Daho
He saw his father once again, in the early 1980s. His sister Fanfan had insisted that he accompany her.
Étienne Daho father then rebuilt his life, he has another wife, other children.
“He introduced us as cousins.
It was a second rejection.
Later, these other children will say: “Here, daddy, there's a singer whose name is like you…” Too late.
Daho Junior refuses backstage entry to his father who shows up one evening at the Olympia.
He regrets it today, sang it in
Boulevard des Capucines
, on the album
L'Invitation
(2007).
“My dad had written to me, and I really…closed the relationship.
I did not want.
I used parts of his letter in the song.
He will only play it on stage once, now refuses to do so.
“Too shameless.
And at the same time, the more personal it is, the more it connects you to people…”
After this album
L'Invitation
, the one whose texts reveal him the most, Daho takes refuge temporarily behind the words of another.
He sang on stage and recorded, in 2010, the poem by Jean Genet,
Le Condamné à mort
, with Jeanne Moreau, an encounter whose memory moved him.
“We found each other as if we had always known each other.
Jeanne told me that at her age she was still very much in love, and I found it sublime, this youth, the impetuous, fierce side.
This is perhaps the only thing that has never changed in Daho, obsessed with renewal: from his first success
Weekend in Rome
to the latest single
Virus X
, love stories, never gendered, always passionate, vibrate at the heart of rock or electro arrangements.
Three mythical couples of the song have also adopted it from its beginnings.
“Elli and Jacno, Hardy and Dutronc, Birkin and Gainsbourg… They sent me tokens of affection, as if I were part of their family.
I'll never forget.
I was welcomed."
He has given back a lot to others too, as it is impossible to list all his collaborations, from Charlotte Gainsbourg to Brigitte Fontaine, via Alain Bashung, Daniel Darc, Dani, Marianne Faithfull, Lou Doillon... After the album composed and produced for Jane Birkin in 2020,
Oh!
Pardon you were sleeping…
, his next project is for him.
And owes its name to another legendary couple, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra.
“When they fell in love, they went out into the desert, and they fired their pistols at the stars.
I found this image so crazy…” The album
Shooting the night on the stars
should be released in February 2023. What he says?
"I'm almost ashamed to say it…" He smiled.
"A love story.
Well, there you go, anyway, I'm an eternal lover.
Until the end, until the day when I will cry I believe, I will be in love.
